Editorail: Fight back against hate

Wednesday

Oct 31, 2018 at 2:01 AM

Another senseless slaughter. More lives were cut short by a brutal burst of hatred.

The 11 people slaughtered as they worshiped Saturday at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue were not chosen because of who they were — Bernice and Sylvan Simon, married 60 years and still holding hands in public; David and Cecil Rosenthal, brothers who stood by the synagogue’s door every service to greet people with a “Good Shabbos;” Daniel Stein, a 71-year-old man thrilled to be a grandfather for the first time; Irving Younger, whose neat brick house was just a few miles from where he was born; Richard Gottfried, a dentist who often provided no-cost services to those who couldn’t afford them; Joyce Fienberg, the warm, elegant woman who was at the synagogue every day to pray for her deceased husband; Melvin Wax, the diehard Pittsburgh Pirates fan who took up any odd job that needed doing at Tree of Life; Jerry Rabinowitz, the physician who made house calls and said he’d never retire because he loved his work; Rose Mallinger, the 97-year-old who, as a young woman, watched the Holocaust unfold.

These 11 people died because a twisted soul fomented a delusional fantasy that cast them as faceless villains.

It changes from massacre to massacre. On one June evening in 2015, they were African-American congregants at a Charleston prayer service. A year later, patrons attending Latin-music night at the Pulse nightclub, an Orlando gay bar. Sometimes there was a tenuous personal connection — the man who murdered five employees of The Capital in Annapolis, Maryland nursed a long-standing grudge over a story published eight years prior. Others were targeted seemingly at random — people at a concert on a Las Vegas night, or children attending high school in Parkland, Florida, or elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

American Jews, in particular, know what it feels like to be irrational targets of sick, dehumanizing hatred. Throughout history, they have been the identified targets of bizarre conspiracy theories, the scapegoats of paranoia. This could be the deadliest mass shooting in the nation’s history of people targeted because of their Jewish faith, but it is not the first, or the third, or the fifth. The New York Times reports that the Anti-Defamation League documented a 57 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in 2017.

Yet free speech — even hateful speech — is not the enemy. Nor is the hotly debated right to bear arms.

Hatred is most likely to flourish when average Americans look aside, rather than confront it. Many Americans seem more concerned about being tagged with derision as “politically correct” than they are about contradicting bias and bigotry. This must change. Most of us have no problem living in harmony with — even befriending, or loving — those with whom we disagree on matters of politics, lifestyle or faith. And the vast majority of Americans reject the idea that hate could ever be a national value.

Stand up, and say so. Keep saying it even after the news of this latest tragedy fades, before the next one happens, or the next. Confront it wherever it crops up. Make it clear that Americans themselves reject hatred and will not tolerate scapegoating.

We are better than this, and we must re-commit to showing it.

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